The First Michiganders

At the end of a long journey, an extended family group of eight to ten people finally stopped their northward trek by the banks of a stream running through a tree-dotted grassy meadow and took stock of their situation. Tomorrow they would begin the tasks they came to perform, but today they needed to make camp.

This was not the first, nor the second time they had been here, and they spread out with practiced precision. A firepit was dug where it had been in years past, and the places for scraping hides and resharpening equipment were likewise marked out as before. The stone tools used to do so were made in a specific style—flaked on both sides, with fluting running partway up their lengths. Here they would remain for the duration of the warmer months, hunting caribou, elk, sheep, and peccary, as well as foraging for plants, before rejoining other, similar groups in the south.

Nearly 13 millennia later, an independent researcher named Thomas Talbot would walk through a freshly plowed agricultural field near the village of Mendon in southwest Michigan and stumble upon a discovery that would rewrite the history of the state—a chert spear point, flaked on both sides, with fluting running partway up its length. He immediately recognized it as belonging to the Clovis culture—one of the first human cultures in the Americas—and contacted U-M Professor of Anthropology Henry Wright with news of his find. The next summer, excavations at what would come to be called the Belson site began.

“Clovis culture is an incredible social phenomenon that’s unique in human prehistory, where an entire continent became socially connected,” explains Brendan Nash, a Ph.D. candidate in the U-M Department of Anthropology who had newly joined the program when the Belson excavations began. “Any Clovis site is rare and valuable in terms of what can be learned, no matter where it is, but there had never been a Clovis site found in Michigan before.”

Nash (right) and Wright near a pair of sifting screens, used to separate archaeological artifacts from soil.

The initial finding changed our understanding of human settlement in the state, pushing it back to about 12,800 years ago, a time when much of what would become Michigan was considered uninhabitable due to cold tundra-like environments. And five years after first sinking shovels and trowels into St. Joseph County soil, Nash and his colleagues continue to unearth new insights into the lives of these first Michiganders.

Breaking Camp

Nash and his team excavate the Belson site using modern methods, digging excavation units in one-meter square grids and creating precise measurements of the locations of artifacts and features with a 3-D surveying device called a total station. Nash says the team has excavated 40 square meters to date, with most of the material related to the resharpening of hunting weapons, as well as stone hide scrapers and knives used for animal processing. Of note, the team has found no trace of foodstuffs themselves and currently hypothesize that nearly 13,000 years buried in acidic soil simply dissolved any bones or protein matter left behind.

“It gives you a glimpse of what was happening here,” he says. “It was a lot of processing meat and hides post-hunt, which may not be surprising, but what was surprising is the level of internal organization that we found underlay those activities.”

Talbot works in one of the Belson site excavation units.

In the course of their excavations, one feature the team found was evidence of a firepit—the first firepit in Michigan. Nash says the camp’s occupants filled in the pit when they broke camp at the end of the hunting season and began the long journey to their southern dwellings, which the team traces to near Attica, Indiana, based on the origin of the particular chert used to make the stone tools found at Belson. Upon digging through that firepit, however, Nash’s team found evidence of another, older firepit layer underneath it.

“We see layers of it, and its remarkable that they reused the exact same firepit,” Nash says. “And we saw the same pattern in the other activity layers at the site. Year after year, they built their fire in the same place, they scraped hides in the same place, they resharpened tools in the same place. Their camp wasn’t random. It had an internal organization.”

Hunter-gatherers are often thought of as wandering freely, Nash says. The Clovis people in particular have been stereotyped as big game hunters with little art, and lifestyles akin to the subsistence strategies of wolves stalking large animals. The opportunity to study them in Michigan, on the outwash plains of the Great Lakes, affords researchers the chance to perceive them in a new light.

“It’s interesting to see how they adapt and change in new contexts,” he says. “You can project the organization of their camps out to how structured their foraging patterns were in general, as well as to the flow of their migrations between stone deposits and hunting grounds. There was something in their culture that dictated how they structured their lives. Almost like it was set in stone.”